The Brits' Approach to College Rankings: Guardian Tables 2008

Parents Forum
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<p>The Guardian University Tables, a sort of British equivalent of the U. S. News rankings have been released on line:</p>

<p><a href=“http://education.guardian.co.uk/universityguide2008/story/0,,2067150,00.html[/url]”>University tables 2008: Methodology | University guide | The Guardian;

<p>Given that rankings aren’t going away, it’s interesting to see what the British methodology evaluates: teaching (via student surveys); feedback from profs; staff/student ratio; spending per student; job placement; value added (a measure of how institutions teach non-superstars); entry scores (standardized test scores). </p>

<p>Sounds remarkably like some of the calls for reform in this country. There’s also much more emphasis on evaluation at the level of individual disciplines, though they still issue an overall rankings.</p>

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<p>This is the most important and worst-measured item. Their metric gives points to non-correlation between incoming and outgoing ranking of the students, which means that a university that neglects the top students will automatically do better whether or not it helps the non-superstars. What they should look at is some measure of average effect on outgoing minus incoming credentials. This would of course be useful in the USA rankings as well.</p>